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Cloud services are getting more popular than ever if not mandatory in certain situations. This is all with a good reason because cloud services are often a great convenience and a great option to back up your data.
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Yet sometimes risks can accompany convenience, and sensitive information that hackers would sell for a premium appears on cloud storage. This makes your cloud data a prime target that needs to be protected from threats on the internet.

Here are a few tips that might help you out when you are going to use cloud services:

Protect Your Account
If you are going to use cloud services, then you are almost certainly going to be tied to an account of one sort or another. This means of course that you are going to have a username (or email address if it is directly tied to that) as well as a password. You are going to want to protect this information as strongly as possible and make sure that your password is a highly secure one (upper and lower case letters, numbers, symbols, and the more characters the better).

Don’t share your account information with anyone, and make sure to change your password every couple of months as well. Sometimes your account will be tied to other things, and if you keep anything related to financial information in your cloud storage, then you might be at risk to have your identity stolen should it fall into the wrong hands.

Be Careful Who You Share With
Sharing is one of the greatest benefits of using the cloud. You don’t even need to be in the same room and more often than not you can share large files you couldn’t normally share over email. Yet depending on the settings you use, you might be opening yourself up to other people stealing your information without you knowing and using it against you or your business later.
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You should make sure that any settings you have are attuned to limiting people to seeing only what you want them to see. If it is a work based situation, then you should try to cut access as soon as the job is done so the person you shared with doesn’t have access to any other information you might have. In fact, you might even want to consider having separate accounts for your work related cloud services and personal accounts.

Use a VPN
When you use cloud storage, you are constantly communicating with the internet, and that is generally a normal and good thing. However, when you are out in public and constantly sending and receiving data, this can be a problem due to the lack of security that is common with public networks. Think of it as you broadcasting your information (including passwords and financial info) to anyone who is listening, and hackers having their ears close to the radio.
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You will want to use a quality Virtual Private Network (VPN) to keep yourself safe. A VPN will connect your computer using an encrypted connection to an offsite server which will handle your traffic for you and block out any onlookers. This server also masks your IP address to give you more privacy. All of this means that, while using that cloud, anything that travels to and from the cloud will be completely safe from harm. Think of it as an investment in your security.

Consider What You’re Putting in Your Cloud StorageWhat kind of data are you putting in cloud storage and what kind of processes are you asking cloud computing to handle? Is sensitive information involved? Information so sensitive you would rather not anyone see it? If the answer is yes, then you should probably avoid putting that data on the cloud altogether and instead transmit, store, or back it up some other method. While cloud solutions are generally secure, there are some things that you just do not want out of your hands. With alternatives being cheap still, sometimes cloud storage is not worth the worry.Thank you for reading, and I hope that you reassessed how cloud services interact with your life and that how to keep yourself safe when using them.

About The Author: JEnnifer Martinson

Jen Martinson is a blogger posting on behalf of Secure Thoughts, a great resource to answer many of your cybersecurity questions. She mainly writes about new technologies, network security, data protection and cloud computing.